Pragmatism in code

Over time I have gone through various stages of selling mods and extensions and somehow every time have ended up vowing never to do it again. I think in retrospect this has mostly this has been due to the piracy that seems to go hand in hand with the web extension community and the frustration that you get when you get your hard work ripped off by some snotty little script kiddy. In every case, the mods and extensions that I have written have ended up being released open source and for free. In fact these same mods and extensions are still available on the downloads page.

As you can see by the date on most of those items, it has been a few years since I have actively developed stuff for a wider audience. Most of the stuff I wrote was for the Boonex Dolphin platform, and whilst I ended up moving away from Dolphin to Joomla and JomSocial I never bothered to release any of the modifications, plugins and extensions that I had written for my sites on the Joomla / JomSocial platform.

Recently I have been developing some interesting things and have been toying with the idea of releasing them for sale, I also have the Dolphin to JomSocial migrator that I have up until now not made available to the public. So with a renewed interest in once again selling mods and extensions but this time for the Joomla / JomSocial platform I decided to put a recent plugin that I wrote up for sale.

The plugin is a simple extension for JomSocial that automatically adds new members to a JomSocial group. I wrote this simply because the only available version that I could find to purchase required an expensive 3 month subscription purchase to download. Something as simple as this is not worth the $30 subscription price that was being asked so I decided it would be better/cheaper/easier write my own. Having written it I could also see an opportunity to sell it to others who wanted the plugin but did not want to cough up the subscription for just one extension.